Description: The original Bittorrent client as coded by Bram Cohen, available for a wide variety of platforms. After v5, it supports multitorrent windows and protocol encryption for compatibility reasons, but it’s still not very good.

Description: Previously only available for Linux, this relatively lightweight torrent client based on GTK and Python boasts an impressive number of features, including support for most major libtorrent functions.

Description: This popular bittorrent client requires Sun’s Java runtime environment to work. It is extraordinarily powerful, but requires more resources (this has been relieved somewhat with Java 6 and Azureus 2.5.0.x)

Description: Written in C++ rather than a scripting language like Azureus, G3, or ABC, this full-featured bittorrent application uses far less system resources at runtime. It is quite controversial, however, as the developer is something of a rogue. This client is often banned by private hubs.

Description: At one time the most popular bittorrent client around, BitTornado’s popularity recently has waned due to its slow development, and thus slow adoption of new features. It also does not aggregate various downloads into a single window (ABC, which is based on the BitTornado core, does this). Python-based, and available for a variety of platforms.

Description: Halite is a Windows-only client based on libtorrent (Rasterbar). A relatively young client, it still has quite a few features, including an attractive tabbed interface (similar to μTorrent), support for protocol encryption, DHT, and file selection. The program comes in a native x64 version.

5 Comments to “Bittorrent Clients”

I considered adding BitSpirit, but it tends to get banned a lot from trackers. Perhaps it deserves to be included anyway, if for no other reason than some people don’t give a damn about private trackers.